Random Characters Whose Real Names You Never Actually Knew (18 items)

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  (#2) Cookie Monster

  • Sesame Street, Big Bird in China, Elmo's Christmas Countdown, Cinderelmo, The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland, Don't Eat the Pictures, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Sesame Street

  Even monsters have names. Even... Cookie Monsters. But for decades, no one thought twice about the fact that other Sesame Street stars like Oscar, Bert, and Elmo got regular people names - and Cookie Monster was only ever referred to in terms of his gluttonous appetite.

  It wasn't until 2004 that Cookie Monster first revealed that, before he developed his dietary compulsion, he was named Sid. Six years later, Cookie Monster tweeted the full truth: "Me wasn't born with name 'Cookie Monster.' It just nickname dat stuck. Me don't remember me real name... maybe it was Sidney?"

  It's nice to have confirmation, but the tweet also seems to suggest that Cookie Monster is so lost within the throes of his baked-goods habit that he no longer recalls his own name - and that's pretty tragic by Sesame Street standards.
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  (#4) Sonic the Hedgehog

  • Sonic Underground, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic X, Wreck-It Ralph, Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie, Sonic Team's Sonic the Hedgehog Universe, SEGA Universe, TMS Entertainment's Sonic X Universe, Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog Universe, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mobius

  Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the most recognizable protagonists in all of video games, and his name is a rather self-descriptive one - he is, after all, a hedgehog who travels at sonic speeds. As it turns out, however, "Sonic" is not the moniker he was born with.

  A series of Sonic the Hedgehog adventures published by Archie Comics revealed that Sonic considers his real name embarrassing. His friends were able to discover, via a relative, that the middle portion is "Maurice," but his true first name remains hidden to this day. According to the writer of that series, Ken Penders, it was going to be "Ogilvie."
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  (#16) Master Chief

  • Halo Legends

  "Master Chief" might not sound like much of a real name, but that’s not entirely unusual in the realm of video games - after all, Mario’s original name was just "Jumpman." In reality, Master Chief is more of a military title, and it’s one that belongs to an otherwise ordinary man known only as John.

  Born on the colony world of Eridanus II, John was selected for the SPARTAN-II Program and given the additional SPARTAN tag of "117" - leaving him with an official "real name" of John-117. It's a wonder that Halo fans haven’t already taken to holding up signs with "John 1:17" on them at sporting events.
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  (#14) Wolverine

  • X-Men: First Class, Superhero Movie, Hulk Vs, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, X-Men, X-Men: The Last Stand, X2, Marvel Universe

  Fans of Marvel Comics can be forgiven if they didn’t know Wolverine’s real name, because for most of his existence, neither did he! When he first joined up with the X-Men, Wolverine went by Logan with no hint of a surname, and it eventually came to be known that “Logan” was just a nickname he adopted after losing most of his century's worth of memories.

  When his true backstory was finally told in the Origin miniseries, so, too, was his birth name. Wolverine was born at the end of the 19th century in Canada as James Howlett, though the tragedy that followed soon inspired him to give up that identity altogether. Having regained his memory in recent years, Wolverine has been slow to accept this past life - though a few select X-teammates now regularly refer to him as James.
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  (#13) ALF

  Savvy television viewers have long known that "ALF" was just an acronymized nickname, short for Alien Life Form. Why the Tanner family needed to create a new name for the creature that joined their family is a bit of a mystery, however, because ALF already had a surprisingly regular name when he came to Earth: Gordon Shumway.

  Gordon’s home world of Melmac either picked up some information from earthly radio broadcasts or experienced impossibly parallel cultural development because their society mirrors that of Earth in many ways - not the least of which is naming conventions. ALF’s parents are named Bob and Flo Shumway, and he’s got two younger siblings named Curtis and Augie.
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  (#12) Indiana Jones

  • The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Disaster Movie, The People vs. George Lucas, Indiana Jones franchise

  Indiana Jones's true name is Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr., but that’s not something audiences found out until Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when they met Henry Walton Jones Sr. - Indy’s father, as portrayed by Sean Connery. And Jones Sr. was even kind enough to inform viewers of the origin of the nickname while he was at it, when he tersely noted, "We named the dog 'Indiana.'"

  The full heartwarming backstory involves young Henry Jr. falling so in love with his pet dog that he ends up taking on its name as a tribute. It's also a nod to the fact that George Lucas named the character after his own dog, an Alaskan malamute - who just so happened to provide the inspiration for Chewbacca's appearance as well.

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